Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen (1932) and the British Film Quota

Alfred Hitchcock’s fifteenth feature film, Number Seventeen (1932), is not regarded as one of
the director’s best. It was the last film he made for British International Pictures and came at
a time when Hitchcock was at a low ebb in his career. Hitchcock had joined British
International Pictures (BIP), one of the British film industry’s two vertically integrated
combines, amidst much fanfare in 1926, directing ten features over the next six years,
including BIP’s (and Britain’s) first talking picture, Blackmail (1929), but by the early 1930s
he had become frustrated with the studio’s budgetary economy and lack of ambition. 1 In the
interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock averred that Number Seventeen was a ‘disaster’
and said that he had not chosen the film, which ‘was bought by the studio and they assigned
me to the picture’.2 Rodney Ackland, who co-wrote the script, based on a successful stage
thriller by J. Jefferson Farjeon, confirmed that Hitchcock had not wanted to make it: ‘Hitch
was as enthusiastic about making [John van Druten’s] London Wall as I was about the idea of
writing it with him: we made the fatal mistake of letting this be known. London Wall wasassigned to Thomas Bentley, who wanted to make Jefferson Farjeon’s No. 17, and No. 17 was
given to Hitch.’ [Opening paragraph]